The Ignite programme and Invest NI brought VERI on an Odyssey from Belfast to London, San Francisco and New York over the past 2 weeks. On our flight home who was seated behind us only Irish Olympian Katie Taylor the morning after unifying the World Light Weight Title. Her #GlobalAmbition is one that we at Veri would like to follow both in terms of pleasing our followers and achieving excellence.

After meeting with Quality managers, CEO’s and CFO’s in over a dozen high growth companies over the trip one thing that is clear is that data is the new currency. Marketing Data, Growth Metrics Compliance visualisation all are the new way to do business, we even met an Irish Expat that joined our meet up in Zeigeist San Fran who’s full responsibility was buying data from start ups like ours.

With GDPR just around the corner, working with learning leaders, whether in H&S, construction, Education or any compliance based business, it is estimated that the volume of data that will be generated by organisations will grow by 50% in the next five years.

Advice from Stephen Ibach Vice President – Head of Data Products for Inmar, a company that applies technology to improve the quality, efficiency and collaboration with their partners worldwide explained that we had to show value to our clients by explaining how we can help them

· Win business with data by showing full transparency and good governance on Training outcomes and KPI’s.

· Cut the bottom line cost with data by up to 10% by digitising nightmare administration costs

· Manging the gig economy with data in a way that everyone that carries your companies brand is enabled and fully qualified.

Legacy paper based systems or use of excel makes controlling this data almost impossible.

Jarleith O’Carroll JobSpeaker.com has been in the US for 20 years and is now providing an end to end platform that links colleges and education to skills based training. Again benchmarking quality digitally gives his clients real value on their investment in quality systems to manage the complex process that training involves.

We also spent a lot of time with companies that have scaled after receiving funding from Venture Capitalist and or Angels. The highlight for me as a female founder were a full hour meeting with two amazing women.

Sarah Friar, chief financial officer of Jack Dorsey’s $20bn payments company Square, has helped the company to beat market expectations and triple the share price. Originally from Sion Mills in Tyrone, she is one of the most influential female tech execs in Silicon Valley and was so generous with advice and her time. The takeaway being that challenging the status quo is healthy and being able to be agile to change and look at market needs rather than just one client.

Suzanne O’Malley is an Irish expat after attending Stanford, uses her her design thinking to improve process at IDEO, was illuminating. Ideo is a global design company committed to creating positive impact. Suzanne, an early employee of Ireland’s Google office, spoke about the importance of Brand and culture. Ideo has a collaborative focus and is customer focused, a culture that was mirrored late in the week at Digital Ocean and one that we at Veri strive to achieve.

Overall the real outcome for us is the old idiom

“ If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got.”

Many people attribute this quote to Anthony Robbins and before him Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, and even Mark Twain. Regardless of the origin, what matters is the point it makes, digital change will come to us in business so why not be an innovation catalyst and Embrace it!